David Bryn considers and Wright's existence this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

Great fun today as we talk with one of my favorite

authors. Hugo and Nebula Award-winning David Brin has written a monumental and quite

fantastic, though quite plausible speculation about humanity's not so distant future and

its surprising first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Bill Nye wants to tell you about an effort you can join that aims at

restoring NASA funding for planetary science and Bruce Betts will share a few

timely tidbits about this week in space history and what you can find in the night sky.

We've also got another space pan to give away.

Emily Lachtoala gets us started right now.

Emily, we've reached the beginning of yet another month, so I think you'd like to tell us what's up in the solar system for September.

Well, there's a lot going on in the solar system. Seems like the missions took a vacation in August,

same as most of the people on Earth, and now things are getting really busy.

Curiosity has started roving toward a destination called Glenelg, which is where they're going to check

out their first rocks, probably. So that's getting very exciting but at the same

time opportunity doesn't want to be beaten by curiosity so that rover has

actually started crawling down the inside edge of Endeavor Crater and I have to say the images coming back from that

mission are really exciting right now there's some really unusual looking rocks jutting

up out of the ground who knows opportunity may find some clays.

Moving on to the rest of the solar system, Dawn has just left Vesta. It's spent a long time spiraling in around Vesta and then it's spiraled very slowly out.

And just this week week it's finally

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